


the dairy queen curse

by bluemccns



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Crack, Death Jokes, M/M, Morbid Humor, every single one of these things has happened to me, except getting a cute bf, i used to work at dq and hated my life, inspired by my suffering, keith works at dq and hates his life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 15:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11854329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluemccns/pseuds/bluemccns
Summary: lance's blizzard isn't the only thing getting flipped upside-down





	the dairy queen curse

**Author's Note:**

> i saw a post on tumblr about getting anxiety watching someone flip a blizzard and was transported back to my days of working at dq and now its a voltron fanfic bc everything in my life circles back to this god forsaken cartoon

There were three things Keith Kogane told himself he would never do: One; wear crocs, two; eat pineapple pizza, and three; flip a blizzard upside-down. For the entire year and a half Keith had been working at Dairy Queen, he never once dared to turn one over. Despite their famous thickness, he did not wish to tempt fate. He had imagined the scenario over and over again; the horror on the face of a child as their vanilla ice cream packed with tooth-shattering frozen M&Ms slid from the cup and splattered onto the tile floor in front of them, and the wrath of mothers with “can I speak to the manager” haircuts. Keith never once bothered actually testing it, and no one ever bothered him  _to_ test it, so he happily remained the only employee in the history of Dairy Queen to not risk dumping a bunch of ice cream on the floor.  
  
            It wasn’t like he was in danger of losing his job or anything. His manager, Shiro, never called him out on it even when he was present during Keith’s shifts. Then again, it was unlike Shiro to call out anyone on anything so minuscule, and Keith often wondered if it was really possible to climb that high up on the Dairy Queen Employment Totem Pole on just a positive attitude and genuine kindness. Usually, people in higher up positions were dicks and took total advantage of the ones below them, kind of like how one of the shift managers, Lotor, did. It was mainly seniority that earned him the title, because any leadership qualities other than being a demanding prick were beyond him. Countless times, he and a gaggle of girls stood in the corner talking about their weekend plans. Keith overheard the one with the ridiculously long ponytail (Ezor, he thought her name was. She quit not long after.) talking in depth about how much head she gave at a party that Friday. They must have noticed Keith eavesdropping during the lull in business, and Lotor was immediately on his ass telling him that if he “had time to lean, he had time to clean.” Keith almost punched his teeth out.  
  
            To be honest, Keith couldn’t quite understand why or how Lotor hadn’t called him out on not turning the blizzards upside-down before handing them to customers. It seemed like one of the minute details he would have loved to absolutely climb up Keith’s ass for, but he didn’t. As a matter of fact, no one did. Not until  _him_.  
  
             _He_ strode up to the counter on a Tuesday afternoon when it was normally ridiculously quiet save for the occasional white suburban mom that for some god forsaken reason thought 4 o’clock was a normal time for human beings to eat dinner. He was not a white suburban mom, though. In fact, he was the exact opposite; a beanpole of a boy with broad shoulders, light brown skin, and messy dark brown waves. He shuffled toward the register, stared at the menu for a few seconds, then dug around in the pocket of his army green jacket.  
  
            “I’ll have a, uuuh…” he trailed off, zeroing back in on the menu on the wall.  
  
            Keith waited, fingers hovering over the register and the life draining from his eyes with every passing second that the boy stood slack-jawed at the counter.  
  
            “Small salted caramel blondie blizzard.”  
  
            Keith punched the order into the touch-screen register, only to freeze when the boy interrupted him.  
  
        “Wait!” he said, holding a hand up, “Can I have a medium instead?”  
  
        “Yeah,” Keith mumbled, having to go back and change the order. “Anything else?”  
  
        “Nah.”  
  
        The string bean boy paid for his ice cream, and Keith set to work on making his order. God, he hated those stupid blizzard machines. One would think there would be more than just two of them considering blizzards were literally the most popular thing sold at that restaurant, but alas. There were only two, which meant that rushes brought on by entire baseball teams worth of children were actual hell, but hey, at least they got those ugly new booths that literally nobody asked for.  
  
        Keith returned with the boy’s order and slid it across the counter to him. There was an awkward silence as the customer quite literally just stared at it as though Keith concocted it from plague-carrying fleas and his own piss, and Keith found himself growing irritated.  
  
        “Something wrong?”  
  
        “Nah,” said the boy, “It looks good. But, uh. Aren’t you supposed to flip it upside-down?”  
  
        Keith’s stomach nearly flipped upside-down. There it was: the single soul in this wretched universe that asked him the forbidden question.  
  
        “No,” Keith said a little too quickly.  
  
        “Yeah, I think you are. Cause like, blizzards are supposed to be hella thick and gravity-defying and stuff.”  
  
        “No, we don’t do that here. Sorry.”  
  
          
        “We do,” said a voice from behind the counter. Narti. Since when did she speak? Keith would have to have a separate crisis about that later. For now, the task at hand was dissuading that stupid kind of cute guy from making Keith face his greatest fear.  
  
        “I— ” Keith started, then stopped after seeing the expectant expression on the boy’s face. “Fine.”  
  
        He bitterly grabbed the cup and flipped it upside-down. The next few seconds happened in slow motion. Wide, horrified eyes watched the conglomeration of caramel, ice cream, and blondie pieces go hurtling toward the ground and splatter all over blue high-tops. This was it, the end of the road. Keith was going to die.  
  
        “Shit,” he muttered, then had another heart attack because he just cursed in front of a customer. “Sorry. Oh my god. Fuck.”  
  
        “Dude, it’s fine,” the boy said, and grabbed a handful of napkins from the dispenser on the counter. “Next one’s free, right?”  
  
        “Yeah,” Keith mumbled. “I guess.”  
  
        This was totally that stupid guy’s fault. If he had just taken the blizzard and gone like a normal person, this never would have happened. Fucking customer service jobs. He returned with a new blizzard and refused to turn it upside-down for fear of the start of a never-ending time loop in which he constantly spilled ice cream on a boy’s shoes. He watched him grab the cup with long fingers and stride out the door. Keith hoped he never saw him again.  
  
        He almost got his wish. A couple days went by, and there was no sign of the tall guy with pretty blue eyes and an insistence on having his blizzard flipped. Good. Technically, Keith didn’t _see_ him on that Friday, but he heard him. Through the drive thru headset.  
  
        “Can I have a mini pecan turtle cluster blizzard?”  
  
        Keith almost astral projected, but settled for just saying “Yeah.”  
  
        “Wait, is this the dude with the mullet that spilled my blizzard the other day?”  
  
        “What? It’s not a mullet, and that was your fault.”  
  
        “Totally your fault, mullet. Catch you on the flip side.”  
  
        Keith groaned, putting together the order and slamming it on the counter in front of Pidge, who was working the window that evening.  
  
        “Woah,” they said, adjusting their glasses, “what’s up with you?”  
  
        “Do I have a mullet, Pidge?”  
  
        “Kind of.”  
  
        “You suck.”  
  
        “Why’d you ask?”  
  
        “Not important.”  
  
        “Mkay.”  
  
        Keith leaned against the wall, arms crossed as usual, until that idiot came and picked up his order. Once he saw the shitty beat up blue car disappear from the window, he felt relieved. It was short-lived, however, because only moments later, the bell above the front door rang to reveal the upside-down-blizzard-fucker in a pair of sweats and a shirt with a stupid cat pun on it.  
  
        “Hey, mullet, what gives? It’s all drippy.”  
  
        Keith strode to the counter. “You mean melted?”  
  
        “Yeah.”  
  
        “Well, genius, you got a blizzard that has, like, four ounces of ice cream in it and HOT caramel and HOT fudge. It’s not rocket science.”  
  
        The boy considered this, and then pouted. “Well… can you make me another one?”  
  
        “Another. Of the same kind.”  
  
        “Yes.”  
  
        “Unbelievable.”  
  
        Keith slammed the rejected ice cream into the trash and started a new one, all the while hearing Pidge saying something about how repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting different results was insanity muffled by the blizzard machine.  
  
        “Here. And no, I’m not flipping it over.” Keith shoved the cup toward the boy, and he took it.  
  
        “Cool. Thanks.”  
  
        He watched him leave again and swore that if that moron ever came into the restaurant again, he was going to kill himself.  
  
        Conveniently enough, he showed up a few days later while Keith was on cleaning duty, bottle of bleach in hand. He almost chugged it, but then Shiro glanced over and he was forced to set aside his only means of escape. He put the bottle down and washed his hands, then met the boy at the register.  
  
        “What?” he grumbled, his fingers hovering over the buttons.  
  
        “I’ll have a mini waffle cone blizzard.”  
  
        “So like, do you want the mini blizzard with waffle cone pieces in it? Or like, one of the ones inside a waffle cone?”  
  
        “The one with pieces in it.”  
  
        “Okay.”  
  
        He rang up the order, then went to make it. When he returned with the cup, the boy looked displeased.  
  
        “What?” Keith asked, already feeling himself getting angry.  
  
        “I wanted the one  _inside_  the waffle cone.”  
  
        “I—what? You  _literally_  just said you wanted the one with waffle cone  _in_  it.”  
  
        “No I didn’t.”  
  
        “I have the receipt right here.”  
  
        “You must have heard me wrong.”  
  
        Keith took a deep breath to steady himself _. No murder. No murder. You need this job. Do not leap over this counter and grab him by the nuts. That is illegal._  
  
        “Fine,” he spat, then made the demon his “correct” order. “Here. Take it.”  
  
        “Sweet. Thanks.”  
  
        Again, Keith watched him go and prayed it would be the last time, but God too often forgot Keith.  
  
        When the boy returned, he was not alone. He dragged along four grubby, loud, obnoxious children that were undoubtedly related to him. Creatures that irritating had to share his DNA. What made it even worse was when he sat one of them on the counter. The counter they put food on. He put a child on the food counter.  
  
        “Excuse me,” he sighed, “you can’t put your  _children_  on the counter. We put food there.”  
  
        “Oh, they aren’t mine. These are my nieces and nephews.”  
  
        “Adorable. Take her off the counter. Now.”  
  
        He sighed and removed the toddler, all the while another one tugged at his pant leg.  
  
        “Tío Lance, Tío Lance!” the kid whined.  
  
        Ah, so his name was Lance. Keith watched as this so-called Lance got his shit together and figured out what the kids wanted.  
  
“        Okay, so, we’ll have two small vanilla cones with rainbow sprinkles, a small chocolate in a bowl with chocolate sprinkles, and a small twist in a bowl with nuts. Oh, and a burger with extra tomato.”  
  
        “Right.”  
  
        Keith relaxed the slightest bit. There was no way he could possibly get this wrong. Perhaps he wouldn’t have to kill Lance today. He brought out the ice cream, then picked up the burger from their fry cook, Hunk. In all honesty, Keith felt pretty confident. Lance wouldn’t be getting to him any time soon.  
  
        At least, that’s what he had thought. Not thirty seconds later, Lance was out of his seat and up at the register with the cheeseburger.  
  
        “Hey, I asked for extra tomato,” he said, gesturing to the burger that was, indeed, stacked with tomato slices.  
  
        “Uh. Yeah.” Keith said, genuinely confused and the slightest bit irritated.  
  
        “I meant on the side.”  
  
        “You. You wanted tomatoes. On the side.”  
  
        “Yeah.”  
  
        “Alright. Gimme a sec.”  
  
        Keith left and returned with a literal paper plate covered in five tomato slices and handed it to Lance. This time, Lance didn’t leave. He sat at a booth with the four children, and Keith watched as one of the little boys started wolfing down plain slices of tomato like a savage, only proving their connection with the forces of Hell. Luckily, there were no complaints after that one, and Keith felt that maybe he could let that one slide. After all, kids were fucking weird.  
  
        When Lance came in again, he was alone. It was 10:15pm, and Keith was tempted to use the empty restaurant to his advantage and finally yank the knife from his boot and jam it into Lance’s throat. The actual restaurant closed at 10:30, and that fucker stayed well past closing time. Keith was the sorry sap that got stuck with the shittiest job, which was mopping, because it meant he had to wait until everyone else left and mop from the front of the building to the back without walking back over the area he cleaned. He had mopping duty every night that week despite the rotation Shiro tried to institute. Keith watched Lotor erase the names from the white board and rearrange them to everyone else’s liking, which meant Keith was left to scrub toilets and mop floors, and truly, he was close to mopping the floor with Lance  
.  
        That idiot finished his ice cream nearly thirty minutes ago, and he was still just lounging around on his phone. Keith knew throwing a customer out was practically forbidden, as it was bad for business, but he felt that they could honestly afford to lose Lance. Keith definitely could. He marched over to the booth and plopped down across from Lance.  
  
        “Hey, buddy,” Lance said, looking up cheerfully from his phone.  
  
        “It’s 10:46,” Keith stated.  
  
        “Yep.”  
  
        “Go home.”  
  
        “You’re kicking me out? But I’m a paying customer.”  
  
        Keith groaned and slammed his fists on the table. “Okay, you  _have_  to be fucking with me. I just wanna know what I did to deserve it. Was it because I dumped ice cream on your Jordans or whatever?”  
  
        “What?” Lance stammered, going red in the face.  
  
        “You’ve been nit picking me all fucking week, dude! What is your issue?”  
  
        “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  
  
        “ _Lance!_ ”  
  
        “Okay, okay! Jeez.” Lance rubbed the back of his neck nervously, looking out the window at the dark lamplit streets. “I’m shit at talking to cute guys.”  
  
        “Yeah, you are!” Keith yelled, and then nearly choked. “Wait,  _what?_ ”  
  
        “I didn’t wanna creep you out and like, ask you for your number or whatever after you fucked up my blizzard the first day, so I kept coming back and trying to find excuses to talk to you, but I just ended up pissing you off. I’m dying, man.”  
  
        “Oh. Well, you could have just asked like a normal person.”  
  
        “You would have said yes?”  
  
        “Maybe.”  
  
        A hopeful smile lit up Lance’s face in the dim glow of the restaurant that had long since closed. “So… you busy later?”  
  
        “I have to mop, idiot. Your fault, by the way, that we’re here this late.”  
  
        “I’ll help you?”  
  
        Keith considered it. “Fine.”  
  
        “And then I’ll get you ice cream.”  
  
        “Ugh.”


End file.
